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It was such a nice idea. The makers of Red Dead Redemption 2, the most anticipated video game of the year, decided to do their bit for women's rights by putting a suffragette character in the cowboy-themed adventure, which was released last month. The game is set in the American frontier in 1899, the thinking went, just as women were campaigning across the United States (as well as Britain) for the ability to vote.

Dressed in a long black dress with a ‘Votes for Women’ sash, the suffragette walks around the map demanding the players “Let me Vote”. It was one of many attempts from Rockstar Games, the game’s creator, to make the release appeal to a modern audience and answer the gaming community's critics that it's an industry which is rife with misogyny.

Predictably, the suffragette character didn’t quite go to plan. Just days after the release, one YouTuber with the username Shirrako uploaded a video of his character walking up to the character and beating her unconscious. He titled the video, which has now been seen 1.5 million times, “Red Dead Redemption 2 - Beating up annoying feminist”.

He later followed this up by several sequel videos, including one - “Dropping feminist to hell and killing the devil” that shows him lassoing the suffragette character before dropping her down a mine shaft. In another, he feeds her to an alligator.

The episode quickly raised parallels to ‘Gamergate’, the disturbing online harassment campaign orchestrated in 2014 by thousands of (mostly-male) gamers. This was sparked off when Zoe Quinn, a games developer from New York, created Depression Quest, a game designed to explore the experience of depression. It received positive reviews in gaming magazines, but faced an immediate backlash online.

"The makers of the most anticipated video game of the year, Red Dead Redemption 2, have been criticised after players recorded videos of themselves beating, abusing and killing a suffragette character." pic.twitter.com/yPmdu4fb1B

Video games, the critics on social media told her, should be about violence, skill, and drama, and they despised what they saw as “politically correct” attempts to infiltrate gaming. For months, Quinn and her family were bombarded with hate messages, coordinated over forums like 4chan and Reddit. The target soon expanded beyond Quinn to several women involved in gaming, including developer Brianna Wu and game critic Anita Sarkeesian.

According to its critics, gaming culture attracts a small number of angry, misogynistic men and boys who are determined to push women out. Emmanuel Cheeseberg, managing editor of tech website Motherboard, seems to agree. Discussing the Red Dead Redemption 2 controversy, he wrote on Twitter: “This is a complicated problem with detailed, open world games that prioritise player choice. What’s not complicated is that there’s a reservoir of video game players who hate women and get off on this.”

Much criticism has been directed towards the game’s creators, Rockstar Games, for allowing it to happen in the first place. There's a small number of angry male gamers, critics say, who will jump at the opportunity to create anti-feminist propaganda, and Rockstar shouldn’t have given them the tools to do it. Dan Hassler-Forest, a Media Studies professor at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, criticised the games studio on Twitter, quoting a news story to write: “The ability to punch and kill a suffragette in Red Dead Redemption 2 is something that the studio deliberately chose to put into the game.”

But it’s difficult to blame Rockstar Games entirely, others have said. Red Dead Redemption 2 has received huge praise for its attention to detail (even a character’s facial hair is considered and measured) and the freedom it gives to players to do whatever they want. But with that freedom comes risk, and there will always be a small number of gamers who use the freedom granted to them by a game for nefarious purposes.

Despite the horrified reaction to Gamergate from the mainstream gaming community back in 2014, the Red Dead incident shows that any attempt to stamp out misogyny within gaming still has a long way to go.